Pierre de Fermat (1601 - 1665) is a french lawyer (yes, a lawyer!) who pursued maths in his spare time. He is most famous for scribbling a note in the margin of a book by Diophantus that he had discovered a proof that the equation xn+yn = zn has no integer solutions for n>2. He stated "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however the margin is not large enough to contain." The proposition, which came to be known as Fermat's last theorem, baffled all attempts to prove it until A. Wiles succeeded in 1995.